New Books for February from NER Authors

“. . . an elegant chronicle of grief, of the sprawling bonds between brothers and sisters, of bodies in this world, of the power of language when so artfully arranged.” —Roxane Gay

Congratulations to poet Caleb Curtiss on the publication of his collection A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Curtiss’s work appeared in NER Volume 33.1. His poetry has also been published in a number of literary journals including the Literary Review, PANK, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He teaches high school English in Champaign, Illinois.

We are pleased to announce the publication of Crow-Work (Milkweed Editions, 2015), the latest collection of poetry from NER author Eric Pankey. Pankey is the author of ten collections of poems, the first of which, The New Year (Atheneum, 1984), earned him the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. His 2013 collection, Dismantling the Angel (Parlor Press, 2013), received the New Measure Prize. Pankey’s poem, “The Weight of Yesterday” appears in NER 34.1.

“Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom, sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. The soundcraft is superb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative, allegorical, direct-speaking, and allusive.” —Jane Hirshfield

NER congratulates contributorQuan Barry on the release of her fiction debut, She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (Pantheon, 2015), a novel of modern Vietnam as experienced through the eyes of a young girl born just years before the country’s unification. Barry is the author of four poetry books, including the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry winner Water Puppets, and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and the New Yorker. Barry’s poem, “Lion,” appeared in NER 27.2.

“. . . lyrical, luminous, and suspenseful all at once. Rabbit’s experience of wartime and reconciliation in Vietnam is one that I haven’t yet encountered in fiction, and it is rendered with shocking clarity and pathos on the page.” —Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones

It is our pleasure to announce the release of contributor Charles Baxter‘s collection of ten stories, There’s Something I Want to Tell You (Pantheon, 2015).Including five stories named for virtue and five for vice, one of the selections from the compilation, “Sloth,” appeared in NER34.3-4, and his work has also appeared in NER 27.4 and 15.1. Baxter’s third novel, The Feast of Love, was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Baxter’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among other journals and magazines. His fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories seven times, eleven times in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and translated into many languages.

An audio excerpt of Baxter reading from There’s Something I Want to Tell You at the 2014 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is available here.

“Bare storylines can’t convey the quickly captivating simple narratives . . . or the revealing moments to which Baxter brings the reader. . . Similarly, Baxter, a published poet, at times pushes his fluid, controlled prose to headier altitudes. Nearly as organic as a novel, this is more intriguing, more fun in disclosing its connective tissues through tales that stand well on their own.” —Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*

Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”